Marketing Blog

A few years ago I was the marketing director for a large material handling company. It is there that we started with inbound and content marketing. It was great!

We had a ton of support from local management, and because of our success, we got the support of the home office across the pond.

I was there for a while and wrote a fair number of content pieces, as well as blog articles.

Eventually, I left the position to join a startup.

A few months after I left, I went back to look at a blog I had written before for research. All of the articles that I had authored were gone. I understand they were upset because their best employee left, but come on.

That’s a bit of a joke.

There is never a good reason to take down any page on your website unless you are replacing it with something better. Every page that you have is another opportunity to be found on a search engine. And with content marketing the more paths in there are the better.

Now I know that they probably took it down because of the byline so how do you protect your blog articles? Who should write them?

And does it matter that someone who wrote some of your blogs left the company? I am positive that there are some articles at major news organizations with the byline of a writer that is now working somewhere else.

There are a couple of different options:

Admin:

A lot of companies have just the “admin” or some other general name for the author of articles.

 

Pros:
It doesn’t matter who leaves. The admin could be anyone.

Cons:
You can’t group articles by author. For instance, if you want to read more articles by ADMIN, well all of the blogs are ADMIN

The Owner or CEO:

Why not have the owner as the byline on all of the articles?

Pros:
The owner is probably not going to up and leave very often
It gives support that your owner is a thought leader

Cons:
Believability: Do people believe that the owner has all this time to write articles?
The actual author doesn’t get credit for their work.

The Actual Author:

You credit blog articles to the people that write them.

Pros:
The real author gets credit for his/her work.
It gives support to the idea that your company is made up of smart, thought-leaders

Cons:
Anyone could leave at any time. If you have a lot of authors, it increases the possibility that one may leave.

No matter what option you choose make sure that you are following best practice like having great Call to Actions.

Wondering how you can help kick-start your blogging? Contact us for an inbound marketing assessment,and we can help you determine a plan for blogging and inbound marketing.

Welcome to the fifth installment of our guide to inbound marketing. By this time your inbound marketing campaigns should be picking up speed. By the way, if you aren’t caught up in the series you can start at the beginning.

In the last step, you created some excellent collateral. Now you need to help promote it with blog posts that are related.
For instance, we have a “30 Greatest Tips, Tricks and Ideas eBook“. We know that we needed to support this collateral with a series of blog articles.

We want to promote the hard work we have done on the collateral and get more eyes on it.

However, just talking about the same piece of collateral, again and again, is not an excellent plan for your inbound marketing campaign. We want to have other avenues for people to get our great content.

Blog articles do that. 

They give us something different to promote on social instead of just plugging our collateral again and again. We get to talk about something new and fresh. Also, we are showing the value of returning to our website

If we look at the title of our blog article “Generate Leads for Construction Companies” you will notice that one keyword would be “Leads.” However, it is tough to rank for “short tail keywords.”

Also, we aren’t catering to every business type so even if we did rank for the keyword “leads” we would get a lot of traffic that we couldn’t use.

So our real keyword or phrase is “Leads for Construction Companies.” That is what is known as a “long-tail keyword.” They are easier to rank for and give you targeted visitors.

Our use of a long tail keyword gives us another “path” for people to find our content. And the great thing is that since our blogs are long tail, they give us more opportunities to appear higher in organic search for people that we want to attract. Like people looking for “Leads for construction companies.”

How do you decide what to write?

We have our base topic. In my example, we have a piece of collateral based around generating leads. Because we have a few different industries that we help, a natural blog article would be about how one of these industry sectors can try to generate new leads.

Either way, the first step is to use Google’s Keyword Checker to estimate the resulting traffic of any keyword.

The second step is to take the keyword and enter it into a search engine. Did you get results that would make sense to the audience that you are trying to attract? If so, then you may have a good keyword.

Now take your blog article and base it around your long tail keyword.

Formulating a Title: Your title should incorporate your “long-tail keyword.” Try to make it attention-getting. Maybe answer the question that a prospect would have. For instance, how can I generate more leads for construction?

Want to learn more about Inbound Marketing? Contact us for a free inbound marketing assessment.

Sometimes trade shows feel like a giant guessing game.

• Are you at the right show?
• Do you have the right message?
• Do you have the right size booth?

There are a lot of questions you have to ask yourself. However, you might not think about one. Do you have the right staff scheduled to go to maximize your trade show R.O.I.?

This issue is different from, do you have the right number of employees for your trade show booth? By the way, we have a tool to help you get to the right number of staffers for your booth.

No, who goes is a more fundamental trade show strategy question. Primarily this breaks down to roles.

Trade Show Roles:

Marketing: Your marketing team needs to lead the way. The show leadership needs to come from marketing so everyone else can focus on what they do be it sales, product management or support.

Sales: Sales always wants to go to trade shows. They know that shows are hard work, but worth it because of the connections, they make on the show floor.

You need someone from sales for their familiarity with your solutions and ability to move deals down the funnel.

Product Management/Engineering/Tech: Unfortunately I think this one of the more underrated trade show staffers. However, they are essential to answer technical questions and provide knowledge support for the rest of the team.

General Support: If you have a large booth and a lot of staffers you probably need someone for general support. Maybe this is a junior associate in marketing or sales who can learn while at the booth.

Company Leadership: No offense to CEO and senior leadership, but if you have to sacrifice any position to maximize my trade show R.O.I., this is where I would look.

I would rather have an additional technical person. Unless there is a particular need, I tend to limit the number of company leadership attendees.

One Leader: You always need one show leader. It doesn’t matter the different scenarios and different shows and different sizes this never changes.

You need one person who calls the shots. The leader is the one person that makes all the calls and can answer all the questions about the show.

This is not necessarily the most senior or the most highly ranked person. However, your show leader does need the backing of company leadership, so everyone else knows that they are in charge.

Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish

The way to save money on a trade show is not to go. Trade shows are all about R.O.I. Don’t try to run a skeleton trade show crew in an ill-fated attempt to save money. It never works out well.

You need a competent team with good coverage. You also need a team that is alert and on the top of their game.

Have a schedule:

Make sure that you have a schedule and stick to it. Your schedule should be in the hands of every one of your staffers before the show starts.

It is best to always have one of each role on the booth at all times.

Remember that you must stay flexible. There may be obligations staffers have to fulfill that occur on the show floor, so your leader needs to be able to fill gaps.

Want more information about how to make sure you have the right number of trade show staffers?

Download our Trade Show Marketing Guide.

Want more in-depth information about your specific trade show? Contact us about our trade show consulting.

Trade show consultants are still a bit out of the ordinary for industrial and manufacturing companies. Typically a trade show is run by internal marketing in concert with sales.

However, as trade shows are under more and more budget pressure, the benefit of outside consulting is evident for many companies.

In the past reasons such as, “We always go to this show,” and “all our competitors will be there,” were good enough reasons to go to trade shows. Now not so much. You need actual ROI to go to an event. How can hiring a trade show consultant help the marketing for your industrial, manufacturing or construction company?

Outside perspective: The trade show consultant is outside the organization which gives him or her the benefit of not being swayed by internal company politics.

Oddly enough despite the work inherent in working a trade show, everyone wants to go.

For instance, a consultant can help you determine exactly who should go to the show and exactly how many people you need.

Also, because a consultant has access to a lot of different companies they can make sure that you take advantage of the newest techniques in trade show marketing.

Training: A trade show consultant can offer training to your trade show staff. You would be amazed at how many people working the booth have not been formally trained to work a booth. Not even for a minute. The training usually comes from someone who might or might not have worked the booth before and may say:

“Yeah people are going to come into the booth, and you are going to tell them about the product. Yep, that’s it.”

That is, in fact, worse than no training.

Planning: A trade show consultant can help with your planning for the logistics and marketing of your trade show. They can help with messaging, graphics and the layout of your booth.

They can also help with planning how to deal with leads effectively. If you are doing an Event at the Event, a consultant can contribute to making that better as well.

Having an outside eye can really help you break out of any marketing ruts and increase your live event ROI.

Post-show: An advisor can also help you analysis post-show. Not every show is successful, but you need to be able to measure how well each show was for your company.

Interested in talking to 366 marketing about our trade show consulting? Contact us here.

In this age of smartphones, everyone has the capability to produce video and post it online. While that is great for spur of the moment videos of your kids at the beach, it may not be the best video production solution for your business.

Is it cheaper to do your video production in-house?

Maybe.

However, an in-house video may not be the best look for your company. The best marketing is rarely the cheapest marketing.
In truth, most industrial manufacturers, financial services, and construction companies don’t have the internal resources to produce a professional video.

You can have professional results with a lower investment following the P.E.E.P school of video production.

Planning: The way to save money for your video production is to have a plan. You have to have a plan that encompasses the formation of your vision, the video shoot itself and your distribution plan. Remember the result is not the video, but how you distribute it.

Equipment: While cameras continue to come down in price the best cameras are still quite expensive. Your phone can capture video; the audio can make or break a video. A good microphone set-up for each setting is crucial.

Marketing video professionals, also have other specialty equipment like drones for aerial video and photography and quality lighting to ensure a great looking end-product.

Experience: Your team probably does not shoot video all day every day. For that reason, your productions are going to take longer in every aspect. Longer to plan, shoot, edit all of which cost you time and money.

A video marketing professional works on video all the time. This gives them the experience that you can rely on for a more finished video.

Polish: Using an outside video production company is going to yield a much more professional and polished result. A professional video marketing company will give you the options of different shots, camera angles and video options that you don’t have from a layman position.

Polish is especially evident in editing. There are elements that only professional video production companies are going to take into account.

How much is your time worth? Video production companies are going to be able to give you a much more polished video output in a shorter time than you doing the production in-house.

You have to think about it in this way. You cost your company your hourly salary, your benefits plus opportunity cost. Is that less than a video production company? Probably not.

Want to learn more about how to make your video marketing production a success? Download our Guide to Video Marketing.

Want to talk about how a marketing-centric video production in Charlotte NC can help you?  Contact 366 marketing.

Generating qualified leads is one of the main goals of marketing and business owners. Especially in project geared industries like construction and general contracting. After you finish a job you need to have another job ready.

Those opportunities come from qualified leads. There are a great number of ways to generate leads. In fact, we just posted 30 of them. However, today I want to highlight a few different ones that could help you with your construction marketing efforts.

Convert your visitors

Your website is supposed to generate leads. However, an ineffective marketing strategy can prevent that. Look at your website, does it encourage visitors to contact you?

If so how? Do you have strong calls to action that make your visitors want to contact you?

Are you offering value to potential leads, or is all the value on the back-end of the sale?

One of the best ways to encourage construction and general contractor leads is to have some value that you give to a prospect before the sale. Remember people work with people they like and they like people who help them.

Perhaps you could create a free tool or e-book about the problem that your prospect needs to solve and give that to them.

Analyze your market

Who are you trying to talk to? Is it real estate developers? Homeowners? Who? Make sure you are talking to them in their language not in yours.

How are you demonstrating your capability to each market? Do you have various proof (pictures, video, case studies) that show your expertise in your market?

Make sure that you show that you can solve their problem. Do you know what they want? For instance if someone wants new fans on their porch, what they really want is a more pleasant outdoor experience.

Drive more Visitors

Getting more visitors to your construction or general marketing website is a part of generating more leads. You can extend your reach via social media and post information that is of value to your target audience.

Another way to get more visitors is to improve your on-page SEO (search engine optimization). If you have a WordPress site check out Yoast.  You can use it to improve your on-site SEO and generate more visitors through targeted keywords. And it has a free version that works well.

However, bear in mind that converting visitors you have is easier than getting more visitors.

100 visitors x .02 conversion rate = 2 qualified leads

100 visitors x .03 conversion rate = 3 qualified leads (a 50% increase)

Or

150 visitors x .02 conversion rate = 3 qualified leads. To get your 50% increase.

Want to learn more about Lead Generation? Check out our 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks and Ideas.